In this solo video, recruiter coach Richard Milligan argues that recruiters and recruiting leaders achieve far greater engagement on social media—and better internal communication—by simplifying their messages to a 3rd‑5th grade reading level. He explains that complex, collegiate‑style writing reduces the audience’s ability to quickly understand and respond, which in turn limits algorithmic amplification. Milligan demonstrates using the Hemingway App to measure grade level, highlights how shortening sentences, using bullet points and numbered lists, and avoiding hard‑to‑read phrasing make content more digestible. He links this simplicity to a 300‑400% boost in likes, comments, and shares, and notes that the same principle improves email response rates within teams. The video concludes with a plug for his 4CU University platform, offering a free 30‑day trial for deeper coaching content.
Chapters
Everyone, I just thought this was going to bring value to you. So I have to record this in this moment because I know a lot of you will benefit from it. Social media is going to be closely connected to your success as a recruiter or as a recruiting leader. The data supports that recruits are using A lot of the information they're gathering as social proof and making a decision around a leader and around a company. One of the things that is part of your social proof is content that you create. Now, what I'm gonna give you is more— this tip I'm gonna give you is more than content. The tip that I'm about to give you is actually any message you send to recruit, anything that you communicate to recruit. There's a framework here that has been incredibly beneficial to me and to my coaching clients in just having something simplistic to move towards. And it's this statement: people move towards clarity of communication. The more clearly you communicate to someone, the easier it is for them to move towards that. Complex communication is difficult to sift through, make decisions around. And where we sit today in our evolution as humans inside social media, we're evolving. The amount of time we're investing here is changing the way that we respond to an ask, how we respond to content, whether we engage with content. So instead of writing complex, most of us write complex. Normally, as I measured my writing over the years, I'd write somewhere between a A 10th at a collegiate level. That would be normal. Long sentences. Okay, complex thoughts. People that write complex thoughts inside social, what they do is they diminish the number of eyes that see their content. And here's why. The simple statement, people respond in kind. If it's written simply, people can respond simply. If it's written complex, people will only be able to respond to it with another complex thought that complements it. Think of it like this. If I treat someone poorly, they treat me poorly back. If I'm really kind to someone, it would be normal that they would respond in kind and be kind back to me. Okay? So what we want to do is when we write, we have written word inside social media, we want it to be between a 3rd and a 5th grade level. Now, we have a media company here that's been representing executive leaders for some time now. And what we were blown away by, you know, year 1, year 2, is that as we begin to measure the engagement that people would get, that engagement was directly connected to the simplicity of the thought that was shared. And here's the— if you're not really getting all this, here's a missing part. When people engage with your content, they like it, they comment on it, the algorithms, the computer, the machine reads it as being good content. And it promotes it to more people to see it. So the more simple you write, the easier it is for people to say, love this, great share, great post, Richard, whatever. It's easy for people to respond back to that when it's written simply. If it's written complex, it requires thinking, it requires processing, it requires a more thoughtful response. So when I write simply and people engage with it, Because they can very quickly, as they're breezing, as they're swiping or scrolling through their newsfeed, they can very quickly know that they're aligned with that thought, like it, comment it, and move on. And the algorithm says, oh, great content, we should promote it and let more people see it, which then duplicates the cycle. More people see it, more people like it, more people comment on it. And so what we have noticed is that someone that will write content between a 3rd and 5th grade level is content that is somewhere between typically 300% to 400% more engagement. And it's just because more eyes see it and it's easier for people to respond to it. Now, here's a big aha. If you're still in this video, here's probably the biggest aha. As a leader and you're writing messages to your team, sometimes delivering complex, difficult Ideas, thoughts, requests. We as humans have evolved in that we want the information presented to us in the simplest framework, not collegiate level. Your team, because they're now investing up to 3 hours a day inside these platforms, your teams will be more likely to respond to your email, engage with your email. Okay. fully read your email when it is presented in a simplistic format. So I will take a complex email where I'm trying to deliver a message that's maybe a meaningful message for the month. And I'll put it in an app called hemingwayapp.com. So Hemingway, one word, app, A-P-P, .com. Immediately, bam, it'll show you, is it, what's the grade level that's been written at? It'll even highlight in yellow, the hard-to-read sentences, and then it will highlight in red the very hard-to-read sentences. And what that will allow you to do is it will allow you to then oversimplify, begin taking that information as a feedback loop and beginning to simplify it. And the more you do this, the more habitual it will become, the easier it gets. Let me just show you real quickly in my newsfeed what this looks like. So this is my newsfeed right here. I'm gonna select, someone that looks like they're writing a complex thought. This— these are larger sentences. So let's just check this and see. So I'm going to cut and paste this into Hemingway App. Okay, so it comes with this pretext already put in there. So I'm going to cut and paste it, and notice over here in the top right, it has it listed as an 8th grade level writing, and it's highlighting everything that could be written simpler. The yellow is hard to read sentences. The red is very hard to read sentences. What this means is that those sentences need to be shorter and not so lengthy. That's the first part. Some of these things probably can be bullet pointed out versus being a long sentence. Some of those can have numbers versus being a long sentence. And I found that bullet points and numbers oversimplify things. Now, when you get into social media and you're numbering things, people can say, I loved Your third point versus having to read the whole thing and regurgitate what you wrote. So you're just making it easy for people to respond. This is about— this is real value here. This will change some of the dynamics of your social. Why am I not getting engagement? Why am I not getting more engagement? Why are people not engaging with his and not engaging with mine? Because some people are writing things that are simpler ideas that are easy to respond with simple thoughts. Got it. Now, this brought some value to you today. So if I can do anything else to help— by the way, we launched our— within the last month, we've launched our 4CU University. You can go to 4CU, the number 4, the letter C, the letter U, .live. 4CU University, 4CU.live. And you want more information on that, you can go there. I'm taking thoughts just like this throughout the week. We're putting them inside the platform. There's a ton of exclusive content in there. that will not be seen anywhere else. Would love to have you join, participate. Happy to give you a 30-day free trial to it if you wanna check that out. Go to 4cu.live. And until I show up again with another video, hope you're having a great week. See everybody.
